Lenovo Yoga 710 Review

Lenovo’s Yoga series is considered to be one of the best notebook series when it comes to 2-in-1 convertible laptops. Company has sold more convertible laptops than any other company. And until recently, Lenovo has added another laptop to its Yoga series, the Lenovo Yoga 710. Just like its siblings, the Yoga 710 gives you a premium experience in both performance and looks wise, but this time, it comes with a much more affordable price. To tell you more about this amazing machine, here is our review in every possible aspect you’d like to know about.

Design

Image Source: Lenovo.com

The Yoga 710 looks much more expensive than it is, thanks to its premium and subtle design that comes in a silver, aluminum chassis. The lid is rather plain that has a Lenovo logo and a shiny Yoga emblem. Once you open the lid, it reveals the island-style keyboard, a large trackpad and a 14-inch Full-HD touch screen surrounded by a very thin bezel.

And just like the other bend-back 2-in-1s, the Yoga 710 has a 360-degree hinge that allows it to switch between four modes. You can use the 710 like an ordinary laptop, fold the hinge all the way back to make a tablet, use it as a display (by placing the keyboard face down and lifting the monitor vertically) or as a tent (an upside-down “V”).

Image Source: Lenovo.com

Coming to the ports, the left side of the Yoga 710 is home to the power jack, SD card slot and headphone jack, while the right side has two USB 3.0 ports and a micro HDMI port. The Spectre, Yoga 460 and Inspiron 13 all have three USB ports (one of the Inspiron’s is Type-C), which make them more handy when you’re using a bunch of peripherals. The 720p Webcam on the laptop is just above an average in terms of capturing image and video calling.

Keyboard and Touch-Pad

The Yoga 710 features a well-spaced but a bit shallow keyboard with 1.37mm key travel that requires 57 grams of actuation weight. Typing on this keyboard is quite good as the keys are click and very responsive. Unfortunately, this laptop doesn’t feature the Lift ‘n Lock keys found on Lenovo’s ThinkPad 2-in-1s. Those keys fall flush with the chassis when folded into tablet mode, which feels smoother and keeps you from pressing them when they’re not needed.

Image Source: Lenovo.com

The touch-pad on the laptop is a silky-smooth surface and measures a spacious 4.1 x 2.75 inches. Although the one-piece touch-pad lacks discrete mouse buttons, the Yoga 710 never confused left and right clicks. Gestures like two-finger scrolling and pinch to zoom were swift and quick responsive every time.

Display

The Lenovo Yoga 710 comes with a 14-inch Full-HD (1080p) display which is amazingly sharp and gives you bright colors while watching any video or viewing images. The laptop’s display has an average 288 nits of brightness, literally outshining the 247-nit category average. Neither the Yoga 460 (241 nits) nor the Inspiron 13 (244 nits) was as bright, but the Spectre was particularly luminous at 308 nits.

Image Source: Lenovo.com

The Yoga 710’s display can reproduce 96 percent of the sRGB color gamut, which is better than the thin-and-light category average of 79 percent. Only the Spectre was more vivid (111 percent), while the Yoga 460 (65 percent) and Inspiron 13 (63 percent) were worst among all. Yoga 710 registered a Delta-E color accuracy score of 1.1 (zero is best). While that’s more precise than the category average of 2.13, its closest competitors notched 1 or lower.

Graphics and Audio

The Yoga 710 is supported by an Nvidia 940MX GPU that come with 2 GB of VRAM. But that doesn’t makes this laptop suitable for heavy gaming like Witcher 3 or Metro: The Last Night. Yoga 710 scored 80,223 on the 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited graphics benchmark. The Spectre (62,054) and Inspiron 13 (61,252) performed better than average (56,451), while the Yoga 460 didn’t do as well (53,196). The Yoga 710’s discrete GPU is more likely to give you a little extra power in Photoshop and is suitable for normal gaming.

Image Source: Lenovo.com

The speakers on the Yoga 710 produced loud and clear sound. The max volume of the laptop is enough to fill a room with its crisp and clear sound. The sound quality improves when the device is in tablet, stand and laptop mode, but struggles when the laptop is placed in tent mode.

Performance

The Lenovo Yoga 710 is powered by an Intel Core i5-6200U CPU, Nvidia GeForce 940MX GPU with 2 GB of VRAM, 8 GB RAM and a 256 GB SSD. This makes the Yoga 710 to handle multi-tasking with an ease. The laptop works with out any lag even with the multiple tabs open in the Chrome and buffering a 1080p video on Youtube side by side. Switching between the tabs is done with out any delay.

Image Source: Cnet.com

On GeekBench 3 performance test, the Lenovo Yoga 710 scored 5,965, which fell short of the thin-and-light category average of 6,622. The ThinkPad Yoga 460 (Core i5-6200U) was worse at 5,848, but the Spectre (Core i7-6500U) and Dell Inspiron 13 7000 (Core i5-6200U) fared better, with scores of 6,829 and 6,458, respectively.

Talking about SSD, the Yoga 710 took 39 seconds to copy 4.97 GB of mixed-media files, a transfer rate of 130.5 megabytes per second, which is a bit less than the thin-and-light average of 138.4 MBps. This was another case where the Yoga 460 performed worse (111.7 MBps), and the Spectre (173.4 MBps) and Inspiron 13 (154.2 MBps) had stronger showings.

Image Source: Cnet.com

The Yoga 710 stayed nice and cool during the test. As per the Laptop Mag’s heat test, after streaming 15 minutes of HD video from Hulu, the bottom of the notebook reached 93 degrees Fahrenheit, the center of the keyboard hit 91.5 degrees and the touchpad was a comfortable 83.5 degrees.

Battery Life and Configuration Options

The Yoga 710 notched 8:55 hours of battery backup as per the Laptop Mag’s battery test. The test includes surfing the web continuously over Wi-Fi. So, you can easily flip the Yoga 710 around all day without worrying that it will run out of power. Also, this time beats the thin-and-light average of 8:11, as well as the Spectre x360 (8:26), Yoga 460 (8:20) and the Inspiron 13 (7:06).

The Yoga 710 with an Intel Core i5-6200U CPU, Nvidia GeForce 940MX GPU with 2 GB of VRAM, 8 GB RAM and a 256 GB SSD will cost you around US $800 or €726. The laptop with the same configuration is been priced at INR 85,500 in India. There is also a variant that comes an Intel Core i7-6500U CPU and is priced at US $900 or € 817. This variant is not yet available in India.

Verdict

Undoubtedly, the Lenovo Yoga series is the best series if you are looking to buy an 2-in-1 convertible laptop. The Lenovo Yoga 710 also delivers the best it could as per the price tag it has been categorised in. The laptop is powered by 6th Gen Core i5/i7 processors which is supported by Nvidia GeForce 940MX GPU with 2 GB of VRAM, 8 GB RAM and fast 256 GB SSD. Apart from being powerful, the laptop is also a battery efficient machine that can deliver you up to 9 hours of backup on a single charge. Apart from the struggling Webcam and lack of Type C-USB port, the Yoga 710 can surely be considered as the first priority in terms of an affordable 2-in-1 laptop.

8Total Score

Excellent!

The Yoga 710 weighs just 3.4 pounds and measures 12.7 x 8.8 x 0.6 inches, that makes it thin and compact laptop just like other 13-inch convertibles like the HP Spectre x360 13t